


To Thine Own Self be True

by bricoleur10



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alludes to Past DubCon, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 20:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3663477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bricoleur10/pseuds/bricoleur10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A glimpse at Sophie’s past. <br/>Eliot/Sophie friendship. Cannon amounts of Nate/Sophie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Thine Own Self be True

**Author's Note:**

> Based loosely on the Reba McEntire song “Fancy”

\--  
To Thine Own Self be True  
\--

_“Adriana.” Her mother decides, dabbing a drop of stolen perfume on her neck. “Tell them your name is Adriana.”_

_The girl looks in the mirror, catching her mother’s eye in the reflection. “But it’s not.”_

_“You can’t use your real name, honey,” she says softly, brushing her hair back with her dirt-stained hand. “Someone might recognize...it’s just better if they don’t know too much about you.”_

_“I hate lying,” the girl says with little heat. She still has morals, but she can feel them contorting. “Why Adriana?”_

_“It’s exotic,” her mother doesn’t look happy. The girl, in fact, can’t remember a time when she had. “It’s mysterious. They’ll like that.”_

_“I still don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.” She warns the older woman. Her dress itches and clings in all the wrong places. She looks like a grown up in the mirror, with all the makeup and the shiny fabric._

_She hadn’t chosen this. Can’t even recall how they’d ended up here._

_“Just be nice to them,” tears well up in her mother’s eyes, and the girl wants to turn around, to take this moment away from their reflections and make it real. But she’s scared, and she doesn’t. “Just be nice to them, Adriana, and they’ll be nice to you.”_

\--

“Wanna tell me about it?” Eliot slides into the booth across from her. 

Sophie doesn’t bother looking up from her drink. “No.” 

“Something about this job hit too close,” the retrieval specialist doesn’t heed her words. She hadn’t expected him to. “We all noticed.” 

“Well then.” She sips her vodka. It’s the most expensive one they’d had on the menu, but it still burns. 

“Y’need me to punch somebody for ya?” There’s a smile in his voice that she can hear, but he’s not teasing. He’d gladly go out and do exactly what it is that he does, if she were to ask him. 

Sometimes she fantasizes about what her life would have been like if she’d met Nate sooner. Before he’d known Maggie. Would she have walked away from her life to join him in his? If their flirting and chasing could have been more, would he have wanted her there? Would they have had a son together? Would he have lived? 

Sometimes she dreams about that life. 

Tonight she thinks about what her life might have been like if she’d met Eliot Spencer a few years sooner. Back when she’d been poor and desperate and he’d been a young military man. Could they have had a romantic relationship? 

Perhaps, her brain decides, after examining it from every angle. 

But, more importantly, could he have gotten her away from her life before it had spiraled out of control? 

She glances up then and meets his gaze. There’s an offer in his eyes. He’d do anything for her. He’d kill for her. 

The power of that leaves her breathless. 

“There are very few people on whom I’d wish your wrath, Eliot,” she says carefully. 

“But there are some.” Straight for the jugular. She supposes that’s what’s kept him alive this long. 

“There are some.” She nods. 

“And this job got you thinkin’ about them,” it’s not a question so she doesn’t answer. 

He reaches out and switches their drinks around. Her hand curls around the base of a beer bottle while he downs the last of her expensive liquor. She’s too tired to comment on his actions or think about their implications. 

“These demons you’re fightin’ with right now,” he starts, ducking his head so she’s forced to make eye contact once again. “They all in your head?” 

\--

_“Adriana,” the man whispers in her ear. “’Tis a beautiful name.”_

_The girl shivers at his breath on her neck. It smells like gasoline. He tastes like it, too._

_She knows now exactly what her mother had been talking about._

\--

“They’re all in the past,” she forces her voice steady. “And they’re not...” 

She trails off, watching Eliot watch her. His face is set and ready. One wrong word, a single implication that someone somewhere had hurt her, and he’ll kill. Not at her word, not at her want, perhaps not even with her begging him not to. 

She’s learned well over the years, how to handle power. 

Eliot is the kind of man who blindly protects the people closest to him. Most days she doesn’t think of that as a weakness. 

“It wasn’t their fault.” 

“Who’s fault?” The hitter questions, an edge in his voice now that just barely hints at the danger to come. 

“The men,” she glances away. “It was never their fault. I made a decision. I regretted that decision, but I never said no.” 

She hears his breathing heavy between them, overpowering the background clatter of the bar. 

This moment, suspended forever. 

“How old were you?” 

She exhales and picks up the beer bottle he’d left in front of her. She’s doesn’t care much for beer. She doesn’t despise it, the way some women do, just never really developed a taste for it. Tonight she imagines it’s what Eliot might taste like, and that makes her shiver. 

“It started the week I turned eighteen. Lasted until three months after I turned nineteen.” She picks at the label with her thumbnail. “I kept waiting for someone to save me. Like you see in old movies. A white knight on a horse with a bejeweled shield, wielding a sword, ready to conquer anything for me. Silly.” 

“Not silly.” He counters. 

“In old movies, the kind I watched with my father before he died, you know the hero would always have that white hat.” She’s staring at a spot just left of his shoulder. She can see him out of the corner of her eye, but his features are blurred. “White hat, white knight,” she laughs slightly. “You know why?” 

“Why?” He asks slowly. 

“That white hat,” she smiles, “It made the actor easier to light for the camera. It’s a stereotype that we’ve, quite literally, built our lives around, and it’s a lie. The color of the hat isn’t about right or wrong, it’s about what we choose to see.” 

\--

_“You’re pretty enough to be a princess, Addy,” he kisses a trail down her shoulder, and she feels guilty for enjoying the feel of him. “Or a queen. The ruler of a country that you’ve conquered with your charm alone. Have you ever considered that, love? Conquering nations?”_

_She doesn’t answer for a long time. When she does it’s a whisper into the sheets. “Now there’s a thought.”_

\--

“What do you choose to see?” It’s a question she might ask him, or any of the others. It’s personal and too close. They’ve been learning from her. 

“That the past is gone,” she says evenly. “We carry it around with us...but we get to decide, too. How it affects us. And I decided a long time ago. I was never a victim.” 

“Sometimes you can’t help remembering.” 

“I feel like this is a conversation I should be having with Nate.” She smiles. “Of course, he’s not the type for emotional vulnerability. It makes him uncomfortable.” 

“We both know that’s the truth,” And Eliot smiles, too. It’s a moment only they could share. “You could, though. Talk to him about all this. I could make him listen.” 

“You can do many things, Eliot, but getting Nate Ford to participate in a conversation like this isn’t-”

“I could do it.” In that moment she doesn’t doubt him. 

“That’s not what I want.” She realizes it’s the truth as soon as the words leave her lips. “I just want...”

She doesn’t finish the thought, and it hangs between them untouched. 

\--

_She meets a man who lies for a living. A lawyer in London. She spends a year with him, learning everything he knows and stealing everything he has. She tells him her name is Madeline. He believes her._

_It’s the start of a whole new life._

_Then, a year later, when he’s broke and she’s rich, she leaves him and starts another whole new life._

_It’s the best feeling in the world._

\--

“What was it about this job?” He asks. “Our mark?” 

She closes her eyes and remembers. She lets the pain consume her, doesn’t try to fight it. Once the resistance is gone you start to realize that the fear is more powerful than the memory could ever be. 

“The name.” She tells him. “Adriana. It was the name my...it’s the name I went by for a long time, when I was younger.” 

“Eighteen?” He guesses. 

She nods silently. 

“That’s not a life I’d wish on anybody,” he flicks the empty glass in front of him. “I’m sorry you had it for so long.” 

“There are worse circumstances,” she shrugs. “You’ve lived through worse, I’d imagine. If I imagined such things. I try not to.” 

He smiles. “There are different kinds of torture. Different kinds of prisons.” 

“The literal and the mental. The metaphorical and the self-imposed.” She lists them as if reciting the times tables. Between them, they’ve escaped all four. 

“Hmm,” he nods along. She wonders for the first time if maybe she has more in common with Eliot than she’d ever thought. Their jobs, as described in the context of their team, couldn’t be more different. And yet...

And yet he’s the best grifter they have besides her. He’s the only man who’s ever lied to her and gotten away with it; because she’d never guessed, not for a second, that he’d known Moreau before they’d started their crusade against him. 

“I wish there was someone,” she says then. “Someone I could hate. Parker and Hardison, I’m sure, have foster families, people that hurt them, whom they would gladly let you...that they wish dead. That blind rage that leaves no room for reason. The way Nate feels about IYS. I wish...I wish I had someone I could hate like that.”

“Someone I could punch for you?” He won’t use the word kill. They both know that’s what he means, they’re both aware of that truth; but he doesn’t want to give her any sort of guilt, even if it’s just hypothetical. 

Or, perhaps, he’s just so used to hiding the truth of what he does that the words are unnecessary. 

She decides then that she’ll never ask. 

\--

_She goes back home as Melissa. She has money now, and power. Melissa has a husband and fulltime access to a very prominent museum. Melissa loves her husband and plans to make the robbery look like an outside job so that he won’t go to jail._

_Adriana and Madeline think that’s a terrible idea, but this is Melissa’s life, and they’re just going to have to deal with that._

_She goes back home because she has money now and she wants her mother to know that. She hasn’t decided yet whether or not she’s going to share her newfound riches with the woman who’d pushed her into this life._

_She thinks she probably will._

_She has, after all, always been a good daughter._

\--

“It was a series of events begun by a woman who was too weak to take care of herself.” Sophie says shortly. “She wasn’t a monster, though. She was just...pathetic. Weak and pathetic and stupid. How do we punish that, Eliot? How do we hate it?” 

\--

_When she gets to her house a man opens the door. And at first she thinks her mother has taken a lover, and she asks politely if she can come in, see her family._

_The man scratches his stomach and says, “I bought this place from the government years ago. Don’t know what happened to the people who lived here before.” He stares at her for a long time, maybe trying to read her expressions, maybe just zoned out on pills and booze. Eventually he adds, “Sorry.”_

_Melissa and Madeline wonder where her mother might be, as she turns around and walks away from the shack she’d grown up in. Melissa and Madeline wonder, but Adriana already knows._

\--

“You can’t.” He tells her softly. It’s not often that she hears his voice without an edge of anger. “You always want to, and you always feel guilty for wanting to. But, in the end, you can’t.” 

“So you just suffer instead,” she laughs, if not a bit bitterly. “You suffer or you leave. Or both. It’s not fair that the world isn’t the way you see it in movies. Black Hats and White Knights. Perceptions and fools. There should be a reason for suffering. A cause and effect.” 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “There should be.” 

“We’ve created that world,” she goes on. “With us as the good guys, and all of these...all of these people we take down as the bad. It’s so simple, what we do now. We fight for the everyman. We triumph. We prevail. We win. We...its rubbish, this world we’ve created. We’re justifying our own want to fight, to be in control.” 

“Maybe.” 

“We’ll never be in control, though.” She bites, feeling a slight edge of hysteria overtake her. “You can win any fight, Hardison can hack any computer, Parker can steal anything she damn well pleases, and Nate can play god until it kills him, but we’ll never be in control of this world.” 

“There’ll always be circumstances we can’t predict, can’t plan around.” He nods. He’s so calm, and that’s starting to infuriate her. 

“And I,” she points at herself, “I can pretend to be anybody. I can _become_ anybody. I have so many _people_ in my head, Eliot. And for what? So I never have to feel? Never have to lose? If one of them mucks something up I can just pull out the next and fix it, but I...we’ll never be able to fix everything.” 

He stares at her calmly, doesn’t say anything. 

“Nothing we do will change the fact that Nate’s son died.” She feels tears building in her eyes when she says that, but she doesn’t let them fall. “Nothing will change the fact that Parker lost her brother. I don’t...I don’t even know. What those two went through as children. Hardison and Parker. I know it wasn’t good. I know that no matter what we do they’ll always have that. And you.” 

“Me.” 

“I can’t even guess at what hells you’ve lived through, and you’re still here, fighting for us. With us. Trying to gain some tiny fraction of control over a world that just...beats us down every damn day. And for what? Why, Eliot? Why are you here?”

“Same reason you are, I guess.” 

“And what is that?” She demands. “Please, tell me what that is. Because I forget sometimes. I don’t even know if I ever knew. I followed Nate into this. But I...I don’t know why I stay. I don’t get the _point_ anymore.” 

“You’re here because...” he takes a breath. “You’re right, Sophie. We’re never gonna be able to control the world. Nobody can. Things happen. Terrible, awful things. People die and people get hurt, and you and me? Nate, Parker, and Hardison? We’re just the people left over. We’re the collateral damage of tragedy. The spoils of war. Nothing we ever do is gonna change that.” 

“So why do we stay?” She pleads. 

He shrugs almost casually. “Because...doing the things we do, helping people...that means something. It’s good. It’s...look, Sophie. We stay...we stay because we found each other. We got lucky. I try not to question it too much, y’know? I care about you guys, and that means more...” 

“More than what?” She asks, voice softer than it had been before. 

“The good we do now, for me, anyway, it’s never gonna make up for the things that I’ve done. I’m always gonna be a bad guy. Hardison and Parker have a chance at a better life. Nate...Nate, I think, is always gonna be alone. And you...you’re just the best of us.” 

“I don’t think that’s true.” 

“Maybe it’s not,” he agrees easily. “Maybe that’s Hardison. Or Parker. We all know it’s not me or Nate. But...the point is, we’re in this together now. This crazy, fucked up world? It’s never gonna get any less crazy or fucked up, but as long as we stay together...it might mean something. Something more than marking time.” 

Sophie takes a deep breath, and then another. She lets a tear track its way down her cheek and doesn’t try to hide it; she trusts Eliot. 

\--

_“You can’t trust men, Adriana,” her mother warns her just before she leaves. “No matter what happens, no matter what they say or what they promise you, you can’t ever trust a man.”_

_“Dad was a good man.” She defends._

_“He left us.”_

_The girl isn’t sure how to respond to those words. “He died.”_

_“He left,” her mother nods, as if they’d just said the same thing. “Men always leave. They always hurt you. You’re better off just taking care of yourself and never expecting anything from anyone. Ever.”_

_The girl looks at her mother long and hard. This is the woman who’s never been able to hold down a job; always drinking, gambling, taking pills that were prescribed to others, and sleeping with strangers. This is the woman who’d told her, when she was thirteen, that she’d be better off getting pregnant by a wealthy man, so at least then she’d always have money. This is the woman she’s spent the better part of her life taking care of._

_“Yeah,” she agrees with a short nod. “I never have.”_

_She leaves then and doesn’t look back._

\--

“Where were you tonight?” Nate asks when she gets back to the room, lying casually on the bed flipping through channels. 

“Eliot and I had a nightcap at that bar down the street.” She answers casually, tugging off her heals. 

“Yeah?” Nate responds, attention torn between her and the television. “Figured he’d hook up with that girl from yesterday. What was her name, Ginger?” 

“Jasmine,” Sophie rolls her eyes at herself in the mirror while unhooking her necklace. “And I try my best to not keep too close an eye on Eliot’s sex life.”

“Yeah,” Nate says absently, and for a moment she thinks he’s fixed his gaze back on whatever he’d been watching. But, a moment later, she feels his eyes on her. 

“Yes?” She asks without turning around. She can’t see the bed from where the mirror is hung on the wall. 

“Are you...okay?” He asks carefully, tripping over the emotions. “You’ve been a little off since we started this one.” 

“Well, it’s over now, isn’t it?” She smiles even though he can’t see her. “We’ll be on a plane home tomorrow.” 

“That doesn’t answer my question.” 

“I’m fine, Nate.” She sighs. “Even if I wasn’t, emotional vulnerability isn’t really your thing, now is it?” 

“I think I could get by,” he says lightly. “If you needed me to.” 

She wonders briefly if Eliot would have had time, since they’d left the bar, to come over here and threaten Nate into being a nice guy for this. She thinks it would have been physically impossible, but then, that’s what she thinks about a lot of the things she’s seen Eliot do. 

“Just had a bad day is all,” she turns around then to face him. He might not be perfect, she thinks, but the look in his eyes tells her that their relationship isn’t doomed to fail, either. It might, for all the reasons she’s already thought long and hard about, but failure is not their inevitability. Just a possibility. 

“Wanna talk about it?” He asks, and it really seems like he might be okay with that. 

“Eliot and I had a chat,” she waves him off, goes back to her earrings. 

“Really? Huh.” He grunts, unmistakable note in his voice making her grin. 

“Are you jealous of Eliot, Nate?” She asks, mock-surprised. 

“What? No.” He snorts. “Of course not. That would be...I mean, no. No, I’m not.” 

She laughs outright at his stuttering. Finally she’s done removing her accessories so she walks over, climbs slowly onto the bed next to him. “Just because the man’s muscular and charming and has that _hair_...” 

“Stop it.” Nate pleads, sounding pained. 

“And, so what if he’s a little bit younger than you?” She goes on, trying her best to hide her grin but failing spectacularly. “You know what they say about age and experience.” 

“I’m begging you,” he rolls over slings an arm over her waist. “Stop talking about Eliot in our bed.” 

“It’s a hotel room,” she counters. 

“We’ve had sex in it, that makes it ours.” 

“Well, then someone should probably tell the management that the lawn chair on the deck now belongs to us.” 

Nate cracks a smile. “Yeah. Maybe we should take it home?” 

“Oh, yes,” she agrees. “Who doesn’t need a green and red striped piece of plastic furniture?”

“Exactly.” He leans forward and kisses her. He tastes like Jameson and toothpaste and peanuts. She closes her eyes and breathes into it. 

“You don’t need to be jealous of anybody,” she says when they break apart. His hand runs through her hair and she leans into the touch. “Especially not Eliot, alright?” 

“Alright,” Nate agrees, much more eager, by the feel of it, to get back to the kissing. “I trust you.” 

She smiles and says, “I trust you, too.” 

“And you’re sure you’re alright and everything?” Nate pulls back a fraction and studies her carefully. “Is there something I’m supposed to be saying or doing that I’m not? Because, y’know, I’ve never been good at that sort of thing.” 

Oh, yes, Sophie decides then and there. Eliot had, somehow or another, managed to have a talk with Nate tonight. “You’re doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, Nate.” She assures him. “I’m done talking about it. I’d like very much now to spend the rest of the night with you without all the yammering on, alright?” 

He smiles, looking relieved. “I think I can manage that.” 

\--

_Adriana never goes to her mother’s grave. Neither does Melissa or Madeline. Or Catherine or Tracy or Julie or Lena or Belle or Stephanie. The person she’d been before her mother had turned her into Adriana certainly never goes. None of them ever even consider going. Not for a moment._

_Until..._

\--

Until, one day, Sophie decides she wants to see. 

“The past is only as powerful as you let it be.” She tells Eliot on the plane. “Do you believe that?” 

He nods. “Yeah. Sometimes.” 

They arrive in the middle of the night and head straight for the cemetery. It’s a bad neighborhood, but she’s not afraid. She’s almost never afraid when Eliot is by her side. 

She stops briefly at the entrance. “Sometimes?” She repeats, starting the conversation from hours ago right in the middle again.

He takes a deep breath and nods, isn’t thrown by the time interval at all. “Yeah. Sometimes.” 

She stares at him for a long while, searching his expression. When his gaze softens and he smiles one of those charming little half-smiles, she feels herself releasing a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. His _sometimes_ doesn’t belong to her. “Okay.”

“Yeah,” he takes a breath of his own and gestures to the cemetery lit only by a handful of dim lights. “Ready?” 

“Always.” And even though it is, the word doesn’t feel like a lie tonight. 

She links her arm with his and, together, they guide each other through the dark. 

Fin


End file.
